The Joys of Bong Cooling

Zarathustra[H]

Zarathustra[H]

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Oct 29, 2000
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I was recently posting in a thread on another forum which reminded me of the good old days of customizing and building your own water cooling setups. You know, home made reservoirs from various containers, etc. I never built water cooling systems in those days, but I always wanted to, and I spent endless hours reading about others custom builds.

Then something reminded me of "Bong" or Cooling Tower coolers.

I did some googling and found this writeup on the concept over at Overclockers. It even referred back to an old dead link (old Hardforum software) to a user named decodeddiesel's thread (no longer a member here) who apparently was the first to build one for PC cooling, or something like that.

Can I tell you, reading this old writeup filled me with giddy youthful joy, and the desire to custom build something.

So, I am curious. Did any of you actually run these back in the day? Is there a reason they are no longer popular today? They seem both cheap to build, fun to work with and very very effective at cooling. (They even went subambient!)

I'd imagine the fact that the loops wind up being open are a problem (frequently needing to refill, introducing lots of dirt / bacteria into the loop, etc). Did anyone actually run one of these back then. Was it as bad as it seemed? Any reason to not do this today?
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I'd imagine the fact that the loops wind up being open are a problem (frequently needing to refill, introducing lots of dirt / bacteria into the loop, etc). Did anyone actually run one of these back then. Was it as bad as it seemed? Any reason to not do this today?
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me and the owner of the shop i worked at in 99-03 built one. we used an old car heater core, pond pump and a shower head. it worked good but all of those issues did apply. no reason not too if you can live with em.
 
i do remember these well from back then. i remember reading about one some guy put together with a bunch of ping pong balls for the water to pour over and a simple aquarium pump. i never bothered to build one myself as it just seemed like too much hassle for my liking. all the things you mentioned above.

the most insane one i saw was somewhere on here long ago. some guy got his hands on a used cryofreezer and ran the coolant through that. there was also another one where someone built a geothermal setup and piped it through his window. gotta love this place.
 
THRESHIN said:
i do remember these well from back then. i remember reading about one some guy put together with a bunch of ping pong balls for the water to pour over and a simple aquarium pump. i never bothered to build one myself as it just seemed like too much hassle for my liking. all the things you mentioned above.

the most insane one i saw was somewhere on here long ago. some guy got his hands on a used cryofreezer and ran the coolant through that. there was also another one where someone built a geothermal setup and piped it through his window. gotta love this place.
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See, this is the kind of stuff I love and miss about the hobby.

Fun creative and cool projects.

That has all been lost with today's industry of purpose designed watercooling parts. It has taken the fun out of it.

Now it's just about aesthetics and RGB, tons of RGB... Please make the RGB stop!
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
See, this is the kind of stuff I love and miss about the hobby.

Fun creative and cool projects.

That has all been lost with today's industry of purpose designed watercooling parts. It has taken the fun out of it.

Now it's just about aesthetics and RGB, tons of RGB... Please make the RGB stop!
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i've thought the same last few years. getting custom parts isn't all that easy as it used to be, especially if you live outside of the US. plus the AIO's don't really cool much better than a good boring air cooler. well most don't anyway.

i still have my old parts running and although all 'custom' parts yes it's purpose built. old swiftech pump, 3x 120mm rad, just upgraded the cpu block from an apogee GT to a heatkiller. the apogee i managed to jimmy mount it in with steel rulers to the mainboard (i5 6600k) but it didn't work that well and caused warping of the board at the socket. didn't break anything, but it wasn't working so well. unfortunately i don't have time in my life to mess with a custom solution these days.

and the video (gtx 970) is being cooled by an ancient swiftech MCW60 universal block. got it used on the forums here many years ago and came with the G80 mounting kit for the old 8000 series cards. would you believe that nvidia has STILL not changed the mount holes? ok i can't speak for the 1080 and 2080 series of cards....but you get the point.

things i miss....cutting my own heatsinks out of old 486 heatsinks to attach to the memory chips of my voodoo 3 just to get an extra 2 Mhz without it crashing. when i first built this water system, i made my own water block. block of copper and a drill press. used autocad to pint a template and made a square array of holes, then cut the walls where the holes were closest to make a bunch of small posts. top was just acrylic plastic. put that on an opteron 165 and yes i delidded that baby :) worked great. well.....mostly. i was using cheap drill bits so i broke many. also broke off some tips inside the block that were impossible to remove. non stainless steel in a water loop of all copper and brass is not a good thing....
 
THRESHIN said:
things i miss....cutting my own heatsinks out of old 486 heatsinks to attach to the memory chips of my voodoo 3 just to get an extra 2 Mhz without it crashing. when i first built this water system, i made my own water block. block of copper and a drill press. used autocad to pint a template and made a square array of holes, then cut the walls where the holes were closest to make a bunch of small posts. top was just acrylic plastic. put that on an opteron 165 and yes i delidded that baby :) worked great. well.....mostly. i was using cheap drill bits so i broke many. also broke off some tips inside the block that were impossible to remove. non stainless steel in a water loop of all copper and brass is not a good thing....
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Hehe

Yeah, when I was younger I didn't have a ton of money for the hobby, but I had a lot of time on my hands.

Don't get me wrong, my folks owned a decent home, and there was always food and necessities, but they also believed very strongly in not spoiling their children, upgrades were few and far between when I could save enough money.

Because of this my trusty old Pentium 150mhz (pre-MMX) overclocked to 200Mhz and my Voodoo 1 board (6MB Miro Hiscore 3D, the Euro version of the Canopus Pure 3D) had to last in my build until after the summer between my freshman and sophomore years in college in 2000, when I had finally saved enough to buy a Duron 650Mhz (which overclocked to 950Mhz) and a GeForce 2 GTS.

The voodoo 1 shipped without any cooling on the main GPU chip. I had used an old 486 HSF, some thermal paste, some rubber bands and matchsticks to attach it to the board and got clocks unheard of at the time.

Freshman year in college we had some epic lan battles in Quake 2, and kids were puzzled because my ghetto old shitbox was spanking all of the new computers other kids had been bought by their parents to go off to school with.

(Granted those were mostly discounted big box brands with Pentium II's and on board graphics, but...)

I miss creative home-brew solutions for PC building. I always enjoyed games, but it was never really the games that sucked me into this hobby. I kind of played them because I had a capable computer. It was really the love of hardware and unique problem solving and projects that kept me coming back, and that is mostly gone now sadly...
 
Honestly if it wasn't for algae buildup I'd be super tempted to pipe one of my aquariums to my computer and use the tank as a reservoir. I've learned enough about plumbing taking care of said aquariums that I could definitely make it leak proof. I keep my tanks around 72-78F (22-25C) and the larger tanks, over 100 gallons, i heat with multiple 300 watt heaters, so i don't know if my CPU could ever actually fully heat it unless i kept it running 24/7 Even a basic radiator would probably make the return water cool enough that it wouldn't cause a gigantic spike in water temp on the fish end of things, but it's still mostly a crap shoot.

Still a fun thought experiment.
 
TheSlySyl said:
Honestly if it wasn't for algae buildup I'd be super tempted to pipe one of my aquariums to my computer and use the tank as a reservoir. I've learned enough about plumbing taking care of said aquariums that I could definitely make it leak proof. I keep my tanks around 72-78F (22-25C) and the larger tanks, over 100 gallons, i heat with multiple 300 watt heaters, so i don't know if my CPU could ever actually fully heat it unless i kept it running 24/7 Even a basic radiator would probably make the return water cool enough that it wouldn't cause a gigantic spike in water temp on the fish end of things, but it's still mostly a crap shoot.

Still a fun thought experiment.
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Maybe you could run the intake through a water filter? You know, one of those large "whole house" water line filters they sell at Home Depot.

It might hurt flow a bunch, and you'd probably need to replace the filter semi-regularly, but it might work...
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Maybe you could run the intake through a water filter? You know, one of those large "whole house" water line filters they sell at Home Depot.

It might hurt flow a bunch, and you'd probably need to replace the filter semi-regularly, but it might work...
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Yeah, i'd filter the hell out of the intake. Not only to prevent algae and other matter, but to make sure that no fish somehow get in. Might even just position the CPU after a canister filter (One of my larger canister filters is essentially 5 gallons of pure filtration and pumps out water at around 900GPH) and has a UV sterilizer that, in theory, should stop algae from growing in the output.

But life, uhh... find a way.

I feel that keeping it on a seperate loop from my main filtration is probably safest for multiple reasons though. 400+GPH pumps are easy to find and submersible ones are pretty quiet.
 
TheSlySyl said:
Yeah, i'd filter the hell out of the intake. Not only to prevent algae and other matter, but to make sure that no fish somehow get in. Might even just position the CPU after a canister filter (One of my larger canister filters is essentially 5 gallons of pure filtration and pumps out water at around 900GPH) and has a UV sterilizer that, in theory, should stop algae from growing in the output.

But life, uhh... find a way.

I feel that keeping it on a seperate loop from my main filtration is probably safest for multiple reasons though. 400+GPH pumps are easy to find and submersible ones are pretty quiet.
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Or you could use some sort of water to water heat exchanger submerged in the aquarium. That way the contamination issue goes away all together.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Or you could use some sort of water to water heat exchanger submerged in the aquarium. That way the contamination issue goes away all together.
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why go half way? remember how some were submerging the entire rig in a tank of mineral oil? then you could go hardcore and use watercooling pump and rad to cool the oil
 
THRESHIN said:
why go half way? remember how some were submerging the entire rig in a tank of mineral oil? then you could go hardcore and use watercooling pump and rad to cool the oil
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With PCI-E riser cables and SSDs, you could probably look at Mineral cooling again. Smaller form factors mean a smaller enclosure and less oil is needed.
 
So many good times we all had back then. This thread has made me realize one thing: god we're getting old!

So many of us around here were in our early teens (give or take) when stuff like overclocking, watercooling and even simple things we take for granted like thermal paste was new back in the 90's. Now it's 20-25 years later.

Back then I lived in pretty close to middle of nowhere so I played a lot of PC games. Dad ran a software company from the basement that ultimately failed, but there was always multiple computers in the house due to this and I learned a lot early on that way. These days between work, home maintenane and having a 3 year old son running around I don't get much time for my old pastimes anymore. Such is life!
 
I never ran a bong but I ran chilled water in a plastic tub sitting in the window of my northern MN dorm room for awhile!

Looking for the old pics...

I also did some cheap chip air records when it was -30F outside until my hard drive (no SSD's then!) literally froze and wouldn't spin until it warmed up.
 
Wow, seeing bong evaporative cooling brings back memories. I was just searching Overclockers a couple days ago to see if my old articles from 02-04 were still up. Water cooling was pretty sketchy still then.
 
THRESHIN said:
why go half way? remember how some were submerging the entire rig in a tank of mineral oil? then you could go hardcore and use watercooling pump and rad to cool the oil
Click to expand...

I rememeber reading a story about 3M's Flourinert for this purpose. It was apparently prohibitively expensive though.

Cool concept, but a properly cooled water block would probably be more effective today unless you plan on bringing the entire mineral bath significantly subambient.

Some of the modern YouTubers have caught on, with one recently using a newer 3M fluid to submersible cool a build. Forget what the guy or the chemical was called.
 
tool_462 said:
I never ran a bong but I ran chilled water in a plastic tub sitting in the window of my northern MN dorm room for awhile!

Looking for the old pics...

I also did some cheap chip air records when it was -30F outside until my hard drive (no SSD's then!) literally froze and wouldn't spin until it warmed up.
Click to expand...

Would love to see them if you find them!
 
THRESHIN said:
So many good times we all had back then. This thread has made me realize one thing: god we're getting old!

So many of us around here were in our early teens (give or take) when stuff like overclocking, watercooling and even simple things we take for granted like thermal paste was new back in the 90's. Now it's 20-25 years later.

Back then I lived in pretty close to middle of nowhere so I played a lot of PC games. Dad ran a software company from the basement that ultimately failed, but there was always multiple computers in the house due to this and I learned a lot early on that way. These days between work, home maintenane and having a 3 year old son running around I don't get much time for my old pastimes anymore. Such is life!
Click to expand...

Yeah, it's kind of the comcial tragedy of it all.

When we were younger we had endless time on our hands but never the financial means to build our dream systems.

Today the money is doable, but between work, and family responsibilities, we just don't have any time.

I still try to do a good big project every now and then, but they take much longer, and I scale back expectations.

I got started in the hobby in the late 80's.

My parents had those little 80's era battery-less Toshiba monochrome laptoos. Nothing quite like playing King's Quest, Prince of Persia and Rick Dangerous on an orange and black monochrome LCD display.

I took a quick liking to computers, but when I wiped my mom's hard drive that day I decided to read the DOS manual and try all the commands, something had to change.

I got my own computer Christmas of 1991 when I was 11. My birthday followed shortly after Christmas in January, so it was one of those Christmas+Birthday+All my allowance for a year type of gifts. Being a 286 with 1MB of RAM, a 20MB hard drive a 256kb VGA card, one 5.25" HD floppy drive and a 12" VGA screen, it was already hopelessly obsolete when I got it (the 486 was launched that year) but I still loved it.

Damn near gave my mom a shock a couple of weeks later when she walked into my room and I had it completely disassembled on my desk. A lifelong hobby was born.
 
I made one back in the days of the AMD K6-2. Worked pretty well. Even used a home-made water block which I still have.

You know.. this would be a perfect setup for somebody to use in the bathroom.... automatic refill by hooking up the reservoir to the toilet tank.

You could also do some auto-refill action anywhere else you have water running to by using a toilet tank float setup.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Yeah, it's kind of the comcial tragedy of it all.

When we were younger we had endless time on our hands but never the financial means to build our dream systems.

Today the money is doable, but between work, and family responsibilities, we just don't have any time.

I still try to do a good big project every now and then, but they take much longer, and I scale back expectations.

I got started in the hobby in the late 80's.

My parents had those little 80's era battery-less Toshiba monochrome laptoos. Nothing quite like playing King's Quest, Prince of Persia and Rick Dangerous on an orange and black monochrome LCD display.

I took a quick liking to computers, but when I wiped my mom's hard drive that day I decided to read the DOS manual and try all the commands, something had to change.

I got my own computer Christmas of 1991 when I was 11. My birthday followed shortly after Christmas in January, so it was one of those Christmas+Birthday+All my allowance for a year type of gifts. Being a 286 with 1MB of RAM, a 20MB hard drive a 256kb VGA card, one 5.25" HD floppy drive and a 12" VGA screen, it was already hopelessly obsolete when I got it (the 486 was launched that year) but I still loved it.

Damn near gave my mom a shock a couple of weeks later when she walked into my room and I had it completely disassembled on my desk. A lifelong hobby was born.
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oh god i remember that flournert stuff. i remember someone writing up an article where they had gotten their hands on the stuff. insanely expensive if i remember right.

we're practically the same age. i'm only 2 years younger. i have good memories of playing stuff like kings quest with my dad on the old IBM and the big floppies. one of those ones with the monochrome green monitor. we had a separate colour monitor for games, but as i remember right it didn't do much colours lol.

i didn't have my 'own' computer for quite a few years. eventually i got an old mac that my dad bought for a specific contract and never used again. it was OS 4 i think, maybe 3. it wasn't until i was in my early teens that i really started getting into this stuff more. and then came the time when i was off to college. needed a computer, so i used my know-how to build something decent on the cheap. it was my own savings after all! i built an athlon xp 1600 (i think it ran at 1.2 or 1.4 Ghz?) and i still kept that overclocked voodoo 3 until it flat out wouldn't run new games. i was poor lol. eventually scraped enough together to buy an ati 9000 pro.

and yes i used to take everything apart. got yelled at many times for breaking stuff like radios, the toaster, etc. and then i started learning how to fix these things so my parents laid off.

related tangent, i think the best gaming skill i used to have was being able to use the railgun in quake 2 with a high degree of accuracy on a dial-up modem. wouldn't do better than 31k, so that gave me a ping of 250-350 ms. i remember looking at the ping and then i'd aim where i'd expect my target to be in 1/4 - 1/3 of a second. can't do that anymore with all the ping compensation in games.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Would love to see them if you find them!
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Found some!

Chilled water, submerged "air" radiator with pump in the water bin to circulate too.
jGYS4wd.jpg

Air cooled temps:
rRJzbJ3.jpg

Frosty after bringing it inside
9l7rQF0.jpg

Trying to keep the hard drive from freezing again
PQHAm2W.jpg
 
One of my mates built a cool one back in early 00s, eheim aquarium pump, copper car heater core, some shitty waterblock but it worked. I thiiink he ran it in a shuttle too (obviously external). Those were some cool days.

Kardonxt said:
I don't miss IDE but I love those fancy round IDE cables lol. I remember having to make my own with a razor and peeling apart normal ribbons before pre-mades were widely available.
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When my DFI NF3 UD came with those UV round cables I was so smitten. Still have the box and the board and the cables :)
 
I kinda want to build a bong now. Things have gotten very boring now that everything is pre-built products. Anything I'd want to build would take too much time anyway....maybe it's just time to accept this bleak future.
 
tool_462 said:
Found some!

Chilled water, submerged "air" radiator with pump in the water bin to circulate too.
View attachment 245727
Click to expand...

This pic made me laugh when I took a closer look. Pretty well same water hardware here. Same pump, still running to this day. Water block looks the same. Hard to say for sure, I only replaced it recently. Apogee GT. I even had the same blue tubing wrap.
 
lobstar said:
This guy cools his house with the same sort of system.
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nice. i was trying to remember/find that to post here. thats the whole house setup but he made a smaller one first that reminded me of these.
 
cyclone3d said:
I made one back in the days of the AMD K6-2. Worked pretty well. Even used a home-made water block which I still have.

You know.. this would be a perfect setup for somebody to use in the bathroom.... automatic refill by hooking up the reservoir to the toilet tank.

You could also do some auto-refill action anywhere else you have water running to by using a toilet tank float setup.
Click to expand...


LOL. Putting the WC in water cooling :p
 
Kardonxt said:
I don't miss IDE but I love those fancy round IDE cables lol. I remember having to make my own with a razor and peeling apart normal ribbons before pre-mades were widely available.
Click to expand...

pendragon1 said:
ppffft, ide origami was the way to go ;)
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I made some ghetto home made ones to improve the airflow through the case. Sliced the IDE cables between the leads and stacked them on top of eachother, holding it toghether using zip ties. I wonder if I still have those somewhere...
 
When I was getting into computers, we didn't have a ton of money, so we made a lot of our own stuff. My dad helped me make a water block, a briefcase computer, cut windows in panels, and all the fun mods. I never ran a bong cooler, but I def debated it. This one lan party, I was in the middle of building my water cooling rig but the reservoir wan't done yet, so we took a big drink cooler and put a submersible pump in it. The tubes ran out the back of the computer via the pci slots, going into an open cooler full of water. Mildly sketchy hahaha

we threw ice cubs in it just to see, dropped temps but didnt realize how dangerous that was at the time lol.
 
Morphes said:
When I was getting into computers, we didn't have a ton of money, so we made a lot of our own stuff. My dad helped me make a water block, a briefcase computer, cut windows in panels, and all the fun mods. I never ran a bong cooler, but I def debated it. This one lan party, I was in the middle of building my water cooling rig but the reservoir wan't done yet, so we took a big drink cooler and put a submersible pump in it. The tubes ran out the back of the computer via the pci slots, going into an open cooler full of water. Mildly sketchy hahaha

we threw ice cubs in it just to see, dropped temps but didnt realize how dangerous that was at the time lol.
Click to expand...

Condensation schmondensation. I did a lot of "dumb" stuff and the only time I killed something was when I dropped a paper clip through the top exhaust fan onto the back of a 7800GT
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Please make the RGB stop!
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Haha, there are some of us that just don't get it, good to see I'm not the only one. Much rather they put those resources into making the products better.

Zarathustra[H] said:
When we were younger we had endless time on our hands but never the financial means to build our dream systems.
Click to expand...

When you're young, you have the time, but not the money. When you're older, you have the money, but not the time. When you're older yet, you just don't care anymore.

Zarathustra[H] said:
I wonder if I still have those somewhere...
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Man I thought I held on to shit for a long time. I think I circular filed all my IDE cables over a decade ago.

One idea for cooling nobody has talked about much is air cooling with a refrigerator unit. Set up an AC condenser behind the fans and blow cold air through the case. You can cool air well below freezing with a small unit.
 
Make cold cathodes great again!

I still have a plexiglass box I made out of RGB cold cathodes hooked up with an old 300w psu, takes a while to warm up but its super bright
 
CraigHB said:
Haha, there are some of us that just don't get it, good to see I'm not the only one. Much rather they put those resources into making the products better.



When you're young, you have the time, but not the money. When you're older, you have the money, but not the time. When you're older yet, you just don't care anymore.



Man I thought I held on to shit for a long time. I think I circular filed all my IDE cables over a decade ago.

One idea for cooling nobody has talked about much is air cooling with a refrigerator unit. Set up an AC condenser behind the fans and blow cold air through the case. You can cool air well below freezing with a small unit.
Click to expand...

I've always read that refrigerators are not the best way to do this, as their compressors are not designed for the load and will fail.

An AC unit on the other hand...
 
Funnily enough I ran into bong coolers again today.


I wonder how effective it would be to limit the effects of the contamination resultant from the open aspect of the loop, by separating the inside loop from the bong cooler using a water to water heat exchanger. I wonder what kind of Delta-T you can get using a water to water heat exchanger, if that would offset the cooling benefits...
 
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